August 4 2005
Emmy® Award-Winning Cinematographer takes on Death Valley
Emmy® Award-winning cinematographer, Mike Single’s latest film captures the majesty and hostility of one of the world’s
most forbidding landscapes – Death Valley.
The NHNZ production, simply titled Death Valley, examines the climatic and geological forces at work in the region, one
of the hottest on the planet. The film also investigates how native flora and fauna survive in the unforgiving and often
violent desert environment.
Shot in high-definition, Death Valley is a co-production with WNET in the US, NDR in Germany and Japanese broadcaster
NHK.
Ellen Windemuth, managing director of Off The Fence, the company distributing Death Valley, says the combination of
Single’s craftsmanship and the high-definition technology in which it’s filmed has resulted in a film of “breathtaking
scope and beauty”.
“Mike Single is a cinematographer who can expertly convey both nature’s grandeur and its detail. Like Antarctica, Death
Valley is an ideal subject for Single’s lens: a place where the cycles of nature are all the more miraculous because of
their barren and hostile environment.”
Single won the 2000 Emmy® Award in Individual Achievement: Cinematography for the Antarctic-based film The Crystal
Ocean.
NHNZ is one of the world’s leading producers of factual programming embracing the genres of nature, health, science,
adventure, and people. With over 70 programmes currently in production, its crews work in locations around the world to
produce a diversity of films for international broadcasters including Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC, Discovery
Health, National Geographic Channel, France 5, NHK in Japan and NDR in Germany. Based in Dunedin, New Zealand, the
company is wholly owned by Fox Television Studios.
ENDS